She has arranged the book thematically in chapters with open-ended titles such as ‘Fears’, ‘Shame’, ‘Recognition’ and ‘Creative Solitude’. Each one proceeds to analyse the practices, outputs and influences of figures as diverse as Michael Jackson, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Chaplin, Picasso and Keats. Barely a page has gone by without some of it going into my notebook, or dazzled marginalia. I don’t think I have read anything like it, ever.

Here is a passage that I have taken the liberty of rendering into a found poem, from her chapter on ‘Ruthlessness’. For me it is the centre of the book’s main argument.

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And now I shall go and read ‘The horse’s mouth’ again. My art teacher made me read it when I was 16. Still the best thing I’ve ever read about the business of all art in any medium. The understanding that the nearest you’ll ever get will be, in the ponderous words of Jonathan Neelands, ‘an approximation to a resolution’. Or the sweetest sweep of a wall you’ll ever see, dissolving and crumbling and collapsing just when you think you’ve finally pinned down The Creation. Thankyou for reminding me, Anthony.

I just went and read the preview and I have added this to my wish list. Wonderful wonderful stuff and something I need to read and heed when I too, am struggling through those bleak poetry writing moments. Lifesaving poems is also on my list, thank you Anthony.

“Even the greatest, most fully realized artists can see beyond their work, to what their work might have been.”
I don’t know if this brings comfort or its opposite but I still like this sentence a lot. Thanks for the links too.